Drumbeat: December 29, 2010

New technology in the future could boost the world’s proven oil resources by nearly two trillion barrels but more than five times of these quantities could remain inaccessible, according to Saudi Aramco.

Although the current global oil reserves in place are estimated at 14 trillion barrels, only about 1.2 trillion can be recovered, said Khaled Al Buraik, executive director of the government-controlled Saudi Aramco

Speaking at a seminar in Riyadh, Buraik said the quantity of oil extracted so far worldwide does not exceed one trillion barrels.

“Advanced technology in hydrocarbon production could add around two trillion barrels to the existing proven crude reserves in the near future,” he said in his address, published by Saudi newspapers on Monday.

The global oil industry, far from chastened by the catastrophic spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, is planning record spending next year, including a large amount for deep-water development.

From giants Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil Corp. to five-person wildcat outfits, the industry plans to spend nearly a half-trillion dollars next year to find and extract oil and natural gas, according to a new survey by investment bank Barclays Capital.

For the first time in several years, large Western oil companies are leading the industry’s charge, increasing their budgets faster than the state-run national oil companies that have dominated spending in recent years.

Buenos Aires – A blistering heat wave, power outages and a fuel shortage added up Tuesday to a second day of hellish conditions in Greater Buenos Aires, home to about a quarter of Argentina’s 40 million people.

(Reuters) – National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) has refused to accept payments for oil supplies to India without the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) guarantee, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

New Delhi: India may face fuel supply shortage next month after Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stopped facilitating payments for Iranian crude imports, which make up for 12% of the nation’s oil needs.

RBI’s sudden move, which came without either the oil industry or the government being consulted, would mean that the nation cannot import 10 million barrels of crude oil contracted from Iran for January, a replacement of which cannot be found easily.

KARACHI: The LPG Association of Pakistan requests all the producers, particularly the public sector to rationalise their prices in January as the Saudi Aramco Contract price is expected to rise by $40-50 per ton during the next month, a statement said on Monday.

ISLAMABAD: More than three fourth of all Pakistani car owners (77%) claim that they use CNG as fuel and 81% of them claim that they are facing problems with regard to its supply, a survey conducted by Gilani Research Foundation-Gallup Pakistan says.

DHAKA — Bangladesh has invited some of the world’s leading state-owned gas giants to help explore its insurgency-hit southeastern hill tracts region, an official said Tuesday.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) region makes up one-tenth of the South Asian country’s landmass but has been largely left unexplored due to a decades-long insurgency involving mainly Buddhist tribal groups.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dared the United States to expel his ambassador or cut off diplomatic ties in retaliation for his rejection of Washington’s choice for ambassador to Caracas.

Tensions have been growing over Chavez’s refusal to accept American diplomat Larry Palmer and also over U.S. criticisms of a legislative offensive by the president’s congressional allies. Lawmakers have granted Chavez expanded powers to enact laws by decree for the next year and a half, a change that opponents condemn as antidemocratic.

Robert Hirsch made waves as the 2005 author of what became known simply as the Hirsch Report, the first study funded by the US government on peak oil and its consequences. The experience of writing that report left him shaken at the consequences of peak oil. Now he says that in the next 2-5 years we’ll see world oil production permanently decline, a phenomenon “unlike anything faced by modern civilization.”

He talks about his new book, written with the same co-authors, The Impending World Energy Mess: What it is and what it means to YOU! It’s available at locally owned, independent bookstores.

Having read enough books with Hubbert curves and charts of barrels-per-day to last us until the second Bristol Palin administration, we’re now into powerful stories that explore peak oil through suspense, romance and humanity.
But so you won’t feel guilty having so much fun at the expense of the whole premise of industrial civilization, we’ve thrown in some more fact-y tomes too. Peak oil stalwarts from James Howard Kunstler to Richard Heinberg to Robert Hirsch made the list along with some surprising newcomers.

The reality is that we are in uncharted waters. The world has never, ever seen anything like the rise of major developing countries like China and India—over a billion people growing into the middle class, demanding meat, cars, planes, electricity. Just because we proved smart enough to innovate our way out of periods of past growth doesn’t mean we’ll be able to handle a world with 9 billion plus people by 2050, most of them richer than now. We may already see that impact on the U.S., which will likely have to dig its way out of recession with the added burden of high energy prices thanks to healthy demand from the developing world.

So where will oil go in 2011? Will it surpass the psychologically significant $100 mark at a time when demand for oil from most emerging economies is expected to rise? Or will it retreat as China tries to rein in growth amid worries over inflation?

Here’s a look at the bull and bear arguments for the black gold next year.

Oil declined from levels near a 26- month high in New York on speculation the economic recovery in the U.S. isn’t fast enough to clear up excess fuel supplies in the world’s biggest crude consumer.

Futures slipped as much as 0.8 percent after a report yesterday showed an unexpected decline in U.S. consumer confidence. The Energy Department may say tomorrow that gasoline stockpiles increased for a fourth week.

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil has burst above top exporter Saudi Arabia’s preferred $70-$80 range and yet OPEC is unlikely to stop the rally, helping to prepare the way for the market to bound above $100 a barrel.

At meetings this month — a full conference of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Quito and talks among Arab oil ministers in Cairo — oil producers stood by OPEC’s two-year-old set of output curbs.

Crude oil may rise to $97.90 a barrel after breaking higher from a “bullish flag” formation, according to a technical analysis by Kase & Company Inc.

February crude futures rising from the flag formation last week was “the most important factor” for the projected gain, said Dean Rogers, an analyst at the Albuquerque, New Mexico- based consulting firm. “The move up may be choppy, especially during the low-volume holiday week, but should test $94 over the next few weeks.”

Hard-pressed UK consumers look set to be hit by further increases in fuel costs in 2011 after the price of crude oil touched its highest level for more than two years on London’s futures market yesterday.

The rise in the price of crude oil is being driven in part by comments over the weekend by the Arab group within the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which said that all its members were unlikely to meet until June to discuss quotas.

QR National Ltd., Australia’s largest coal transporter by rail, expects deliveries to be “adversely” affected for at least this month and next after rain and a derailment forced track closures in Queensland.

The wet weather and flooding is “hampering access to the track and hence recovery efforts,” Brisbane-based QR said in a statement today. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh cut short her Christmas vacation to oversee the response to the floods, she said in a statement.

(Reuters) – Brazilian state oil company Petrobras said Wednesday its Lula well, in the Tupi area in the deep water offshore region known as the subsalt, has recoverable reserves of 6.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

It also said in a securities filing that its Cernambi well, in Iracema field, has 1.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

A more important difference, though, could be the energy needed for conversion from the natural hydrocarbon molecule, methane, to the synthetic one, ethylene. In Siluria’s process, using a new kind of catalyst, that conversion gives off heat instead of requiring it.

Producing the fuel gas required by a Fischer Tropsch process is “rather brute force,’’ said Alex Tkachenko, Siluria’s president. Using a catalyst that produces a bigger hydrocarbon without going through the fuel gas stage is “more elegant,’’ he said.

Iraqi Kurds are pushing the central government to recognize oil contracts they signed with international companies, insisting the self-ruled region will not resume oil exports until Baghdad accepts the deals.

LONDON -(Dow Jones)- Iran’s gasoline consumption has fallen by 20% on a year-on-year basis since a four-fold increase in prices came into force, a top Iranian oil official said Wednesday, as a broad overhaul of subsidies hit oil-products use.

The gasoline subsidy cut comes after after a U.S. ban this summer on the country’s gasoline imports. Feared riots against the rise have not materialized so far amid cash payments to compensate the less well-off and heavy police presence.

New Delhi (PTI) Top officials of Reserve Bank of India, whose decision to bar dollar and euro payments for imports from Iran may hit crude oil imports, will meet their Iranian counterparts later this week to resolve the issue.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Corruption charges against one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most trusted political advisers provided the latest evidence of deep rifts within the Iranian president’s own conservative political camp.

The challenge by Ahmadinejad’s rivals — one of them the head of the judiciary — could set the tone for a bitter fight leading up to the next big political moment in Iran, parliamentary elections less than a year away.

WASHINGTON – American commanders in Afghanistan are pushing to expand special operations raids into tribal areas of Pakistan where Islamist militants are known to find refuge, according to a newspaper report.

The Harperites refuse to acknowledge the two crucial realities of our time, peak oil and climate change. Experts across a range of fields, from geology to geo-economics and the U.S. military, say that world petroleum production will peak in the next few years and then will began an inexorable decline. The rise of China, India, Brazil and other countries coincides with peak oil. Their soaring demand for petroleum means that oil prices, with fluctuations along the way, are headed higher. Get ready for gasoline prices of $3.00, then $3.50 and $4.00 a litre. They’re coming.

Here are my choices for the Top 10 energy related stories of 2010. I can’t remember having such a difficult time squeezing this list down to 10 stories, because there were many important energy stories for 2010. It was hard to cut some of them from the Top 10; so hard that I almost did a Top 15. But I made some difficult choices, and offer my views on the 10 most important energy stories of 2010.

What happens when oil wells start producing less oil? And they will. This is a question being asked at the highest levels of government all over the world every day. The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico propelled global concern for the topic. It may not be headline news anymore, but gas prices surely are, and if you live in the Northeast and heat with oil, your oil bill is probably looking quite a bit different than it did this time last year.

Despite a last-ditch attempt by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others to end the subsidies, the Senate decided to fork out more pork barrel funds to corn farmers and, by extension, to firms like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland for another year.

But don’t count on U.S. ethanol production ever coming even close to reaching that lofty target of 36 billion gallons per year. If the return of fiscal sanity to Washington doesn’t undercut its life-sustaining subsidies, an aborted recovery in motor vehicle sales will soon put the kibosh on future production growth.

While Indian police keep no specific numbers on traffic-related assaults, officers interviewed agree that road rage is on the rise, fueled by the country’s economic boom and the masses of new vehicles it is adding to the already crowded roads.

Why are many European carmakers now planning to build electric vehicles? Because many European cities are widely expected to ban high-emissions vehicles from their city cores over the next decade–perhaps even vehicles with any emissions at all.

Now, Paris may be the first city to experiment with such a policy. Next year, it will begin to test restrictions on vehicles that emit more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometer–the measure of a car’s contribution to greenhouse gases.

HOUSTON (Reuters) – The administrator of BP Plc’s $20 billion compensation fund has paid $43 million to residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast who agree not to sue the company for damages stemming from the nation’s worst offshore oil spill.

NEW YORK (AP) — As the Gulf oil spill gushed out of control, BP’s financial liabilities seemed big enough to sink the company. No more.

Cleanup, government fines, lawsuits, legal fees and damage claims will likely exceed the $40 billion that BP has publicly estimated, according to an Associated Press analysis. But they’ll be far below the highest estimates made over the summer by legal experts and prominent Wall Street banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which said costs could near $200 billion.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – State pension funds in Ohio and New York were named lead plaintiffs in a shareholder suit against BP Plc that alleges losses due to the Gulf Coast oil spill, according to a U.S. district court ruling.

The case seeks damages for investors that bought shares of BP or American depository receipts of the company from 2005 through 2010.

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian rare earths miner Lynas on Wednesday said China had slashed its exports quota for the lucrative metals used in flat screens and hybrid cars, driving a 12 percent jump in its share price.

Lynas said China had cut export guidance for the first half of 2011 by about 35 percent to 14,446 tonnes, significantly reducing world supplies of the resource critical to digital-age goods such as iPods and plasma TVs.

WICCOPEE – SpectraWatt Inc. announced today that it will begin some layoffs of workers at its solar cell plant here. A formal filing with the state said “plant closing” will affect as many as 117 workers.

The company, in a short news release, said, “This action is undertaken in response to deteriorating market conditions resulting from a harsher-than-usual European winter causing a large drop-off in demand for solar cells.”

MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., the power unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will expand wind-generation capacity by purchasing 258 turbines from Siemens AG and acquiring a project under development in Iowa.

BEFORE the Malaysian government takes the country down the path towards nuclear energy, every citizen must decide if nuclear power is the right choice for the nation.

For some, the threat of climate change and peak oil has produced a false choice between either going nuclear or suffering unabated global warming. But Malaysia, and indeed, the rest of the world, has an increasing number of clean and renewable energy options to choose from, such as solar, wind, tidal and wave.

Being less complacent, China has been first to recognize the danger of resource shortages down the road. Many of China’s elite have backgrounds in engineering and science. Peak oil and Peak Coal have been seriously discussed by Chinese scientists in academic journals, which government leaders actually read. China understands its need to segue into alternative energy as it urbanizes 400 million people. The nation has gone from nowhere to having the world’s largest production of wind and solar energy. Wind power growth has been increasing by 100% a year. If China realizes even a fraction of its plans, it will become number one in nuclear energy as well. China’s emphasis on growing real industries is one reason it survived the 2008 financial crisis better than the West.

Brace yourself: The neo-Malthusians will soon be in full cry, warning that population is outrunning the world’s food supply. And in this debate, there’s no middle ground – some experts tell us we are drowning in surpluses, while others warn that imminent starvation looms as a result of diminishing cultivable land, water shortages, unsustainable/unhealthful hybrids and the impending loss of cheap petrochemical fertilizers.

In order to successfully engage in a Compassionate Resistance movement, we need to know that we can survive as a community without being dependent on resources the elite control, such as gasoline and processed food. We need to relearn those skills our mothers learned from their mothers: how to grow vegetables in the backyard without Miracle Grow — how to make (or at least mend and alter) clothes” how to cook up a healthy meal with whatever ingredients we have on hand” how to collect and save water” how to compost” how to raise chickens and goats” the list goes on and on.

I still remember the goosebumpy feeling I’d get whenever I tiptoed into my grandparents’ cellar as a kid. It only took a minute to grab a can of pop or a jar of homemade pickles off the shelf, but I knew there was a risk of running into a freshly killed deer hanging up in a dark corner, or, in my child’s imagination, possibly something worse.

Now, I admire the cellar in all of its cold, dank, cave-like glory. My grandma still stores apples, onions, potatoes, carrots, homemade canned goods, sauerkraut and yes, wild game down there, and her place is where I want to be if disaster strikes.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Frustration and fears of disease mounted in Northern Ireland Wednesday as tens of thousands of people were left without water after much of the supply drained away through broken pipes following a deep freeze and a sudden thaw.

Japan’s government took a step back from plans to start carbon trading in 2013 amid opposition from industries that say emission-trading rules would add to costs and limit their ability to compete against rivals in China and India who don’t face the same restrictions.

BASTROP, Texas – Along a stretch of Highway 21, in a pastoral, hilly region of Texas, is a vegetative wasteland. Trees are barren, or covered in gray, dying foliage and peeling bark. Fallen, dead limbs litter the ground where pecan growers and ranchers have watched trees die slow, agonizing deaths.

Visible above the horizon is what many plant specialists, environmentalists and scientists believe to be the culprit: the Fayette Power Project — a coal-fired power plant for nearly 30 years has operated mostly without equipment designed to decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

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